How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mac

I'd been working for a large magazine publisher when I was told we would be moving to "desktop publishing." It was the wave of the future, and it made economical sense, I was told. And I was livid.

I'd been working on an Atex terminal for several years. It was ugly and very '70s. But it was the first machine I'd relied on for my editorial career.

Never mind that it was anything but WYSIWYG. Everything one wrote on Atex required commands in order to insert breaks or styling. One had to memorize codes for italics, bold, etc. Really, come to think of it ... Atex was like HTML. But at least HTML is easy to preview. Anything written in Atex had to be printed. And printed again. And again. Until it looked perfect. Then it was time to be pasted-up onto boards and then you were ready for publication (more or less -- I didn't work on the production side, so I know I'm leaving steps out).

The bottom line is, Atex sucked. But I knew it like a familiar lover. I knew how to get it to cooperate. I knew all the little tricks it took just to get it to do what I wanted. I knew Atex so well, I was able to teach it to newer members of the staff.

So, I was a curmudgeon about being forced to work on the Mac. And, oh god ... Quark? "What the hell is Quark? I don't know how to use this. It's so COMPLICATED. I hate this whole Mac thing!" (I know, it sounds so old-lady to be so resistant. I was only in my 20s. Agh!)

Resistance was futile, though. The Mac was there to stay. I became a Quark XPress expert because I had to.

Eventually I explored all the nuances of the Mac operating system. At that point, it was called System 7. (It was well before Apple began using OS in the product name.)

I think what made me start to appreciate the Mac OS was its relative ease compared with DOS, or even Windows 3.1, which I'd had on my Tandy PC at home. (I eventually referred to that Tandy as "the Trashy." It ran WordPerfect, which was not WYSIWYG either. Feh.)

Within two years of having that Atex terminal taken away from me, I understood what people loved so much about Apple. The cleanliness of an interface. The stability of the operating system. The better temperament. The ease with which one could create things on it.

Instead of forcing a user to jump through hoops just to figure out how it worked, the Mac let you focus on what you bought the computer to do in the first place. Never a mysterious blue screen, or an error message I couldn't figure out.

Macs are workhorses. Only recently did I replace my Mac G5 tower from 2003. And the fact is, it's still a useful machine. But, even maxed out on RAM, that G5 began to choke and stutter. I couldn't even sync my Google Calendar with iCal, because the machine wouldn't support a version of iCal new enough to allow that. (And if you're the kind of Mac geek who could switch out processors or whatever, just to make that old tower work with a current OS, my hat is off to you. I'm not that person, though.)

That G5 tower lasted me, even running Adobe Creative Suite and Final Cut Express, for eight and a half years. How many people are still using their PC from eight and a half years ago?

To me, the Mac makes sense. It also freed me from providing endless tech support by phone or in person to my mother or my sister ... because I convinced them both to ditch their PCs and get Macs. The Macs let them do what they need to do. They let me do what I need to do. It's beautiful.

So, rest in peace, Steve Jobs. You made Apple what it is today, Apple helped make my life easier.

Even though I didn't appreciate it at first.